Let’s talk about your mental health as an agency founder.
Whilst mental health as a topic has definitely grown over the last decade or so, it’s still not talked about enough, particularly within the agency owner world.
Today, I want to share a small part of my own journey here and give you a few things to think about that may help you manage your mental health better than I did!
The compounding effect of lots of normal challenges
As a business, you have to accept that the job comes with some realities that are going to cause you anxiety and stress. Things such as:
- Managing cash flow.
- Winning and losing revenue.
- Hiring and firing staff.
- Losing your star performers.
- Having to do ten jobs at the same time.
Then as an agency owner, there are certain parts of the business model that naturally cause additional stress. For example:
- In order to grow, you typically need a consistent stream of new clients.
- You also need to retain most of your current clients.
- The work that you do can be top notch, but clients can still leave.
- Clients are nearly always looking for ways to in-house your services.
- As you grow, you need to keep hiring new people, but this balance of growth is rarely linear and straightforward. You normally have too many clients or too few for the number of people you have.
All of this is to say that these issues are ones that won’t come as a surprise to you when running your agency. You just need to find effective ways to manage them.
This is fine and nothing to particularly worry about. You’re not failing if any of these issues happen to you. Yes, if they are happening over and over again, you need to take a close look at why this is.
But it doesn’t stop there.
In addition to affecting the health and sustainability of your agency, experiencing these issues over and over again can negatively affect your personal health, happiness and well-being.
The compound effect of these issues can take its toll on you and make it harder for you to solve them in the future, along with making it harder for you to just be effective at the more positive parts of your job.
Why we allow these issues to compound over time
Well, they’re pretty normal issues, right? That’s the problem.
To illustrate the point, let’s look at an issue that many of us have probably been affected by and was far from normal – the pandemic.
None of us had a global pandemic on our list of things to be careful about when we started an agency pre-2020.
So dealing with it was unique and unexpected, whilst the way to navigate it wasn’t very clear for most of 2020.
Compare this with the issues that we’ve talked about above:
- Client retention.
- New business.
- Team culture.
These are all things that we expect to experience challenges with when running an agency.
This means that we tend to normalise them in our minds. We just deal with them because that’s what we’re meant to do – it’s our job.
As a result, we can ignore the impact on our mental health or at best, realise that we are indeed struggling but keep going anyway and hope for the best.
This is what I did. And it was my biggest mistake when managing my own mental health when running my agency.
“You can’t to-do list your way out of these feelings”
This is what my therapist said to me about six weeks after I’d decided to leave my own agency due to my mental health.
It gave me a huge moment of realisation.
In pretty much all of my career so far, my reaction to difficult situations was to simply focus on getting stuff done. I’d figure out what I needed to do in order to solve the problem and I’d just get on with it.
This worked for pretty much all of my career, so I kept doing it.
But up until this point in my career, I’d been lucky enough to avoid any hugely negative, debilitating effects on my mental health. Sure, I’d experienced some low moments and times where the world felt like it was falling apart, but those moments passed after days or weeks.
Looking back on things, I realised that the challenges I’d been feeling and my mental health had been struggling for 2-3 years.
Things had been a bit of a slog since the pandemic and whilst many of the issues were “normal” – there were a lot of them and I didn’t realise the compounding effect they were taking on my mental health.
I also had a habit of taking a lot of problems and holding them in my head or on my shoulders, which certainly didn’t help me or even necessarily get them solved any quicker!
If any of this resonates, then I guess I’d advise you to try and not be me!
How to avoid being like how I was
So, how can you do that?
Avoid tying your self-worth to the success of your agency
I won’t lie, this is easier said than done and even when I became aware of this, I struggled to split out my sense of self-worth from my agency.
But just becoming aware of this issue genuinely did help me to improve things.
The main way that I helped myself here was to think of my agency as one part of a career journey. By zooming right out, I was more able to smooth out the highs and the lows of the day-to-day.
I also started to allow myself to think about my career after my agency. I didn’t spend loads of actual time on this, but it helped to start to wonder about what was next.
Optimise for the journey, not the output
My co-founder and I once received some well intentioned, but ultimately damaging advice. It was along the lines of:
“Reach x amount in EBITDA and everything will be easier after that.”
So we started to optimise for this EBITDA number. The damage was gradual, but real because we started to lose sight of some important things that had gotten us to where we were.
I stopped enjoying the day-to-day because all I could see was challenges and these challenges were stopping us from hitting this goal that we’d set ourselves. It felt like it was all that mattered now.
It wasn’t.
Yes, have a big goal, but also think about what you need in order to enjoy the journey towards that goal, then optimise for that as well.
Try therapy
I don’t believe in telling you that you need to do this. But I would highly encourage you to at least try it once.
I’d also mention that the first therapist who I spoke to after leaving my agency wasn’t right for me. I had two sessions with him and then stopped because it wasn’t feeling right.
The next therapist who I found was amazing and exactly what I needed.
I don’t know if having a therapist would have changed the ultimate outcome for me, but I’m positive that I would have stood more of a chance of a better outcome with her than without her.